Women Decide for Whom the Buck Stops

There's a new woman voter out there. Empowered women are holding
themselves to the same standard they hold men to, and it's showing up in
the public opinion polls. Female concerns over the debt and the deficit,
not the usual gender issues, have dramatically increased as the Nov. 6
election bears down upon us.

The Gallup Poll now shows Mitt Romney trailing the president by
only a point among women who are likely to vote in 12 swing states. This
follows a Pew Research Center poll taken after the first presidential
debate showing that President Obama's 18-point lead among women had shrunk
to a tie, 47 percent to 47 percent.

"In every poll, we've seen a major surge among women in
favorability for Romney," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told USA Today
after the first debate. These polls find women increasingly concerned with
the deficit and debt, just like men. The social issues continue to be more
important to women than to men, but these issues no longer dominate the
discussion.

Hillary Clinton's famous needling of Barack Obama four years ago
-- "the buck stops in the Oval Office" -- suggested that he didn't have
the leadership qualities required in a president. She reprised the theme
this week, inadvertently or not, when she fell on the president's sword to
take the blame for the national-security fiasco in Libya.

Her attempt to rescue the president with her declaration that "the
buck stops with me" follows the litany of mixed metaphors in search of
someone to blame for the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three
other Americans in the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in
Benghazi. The president stands accused of "throwing Hillary under the
bus," she's accused of "getting Obama off the hook," and the State
Department has become the "broken link" in "the chain of events" of a
major security failure. The "failure of intelligence" contributes a new
definition of incompetence at the highest levels of government.

When a president hides behind the skirt, or actually the pantsuit,
of his secretary of state, it's enough to tempt even a feminist to put
national security above the social issues.